On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

Looking for a real weighted highland cow and don’t want to get scammed? I found the real one here. Read on and I’ll prove it. During the summer, my long term partner shared an Instagram ad similar to this one: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jessica | UGC Creator | Lifestyle Vlogger (@jessicalynnciraulo) Well aint that a fucking cute cow. In case that Instagram post gets deleted, here’s what the cow looks like: ...

This American Enterprise Institute chart , which breaks down price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has by now become very widely known. A high-level takeaway from this chart is that labor-intensive services (education, healthcare) get more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms over time, while manufactured goods ( TVs , toys, clothing) get less expensive over time. But there are many types of goods that aren’t shown on this chart. One example is c...

Background and bytecode design The ZJIT compiler compiles Ruby bytecode (YARV) to machine code. It starts by transforming the stack machine bytecode into a high-level graph-based intermediate representation called HIR. We use a more or less typical 1 control-flow graph (CFG) in HIR. We have a compilation unit, Function , which has multiple basic blocks, Block . Each block contains multiple instructions, Insn . HIR is always in SSA form, and we use the variant of SSA with block paramete...

Yesterday I attended a Code Jam event organised by the EdinburghJS community. During the event, I met many wonderful people. At one point, someone asked me to share my LinkedIn, to which I responded that I’ll share my website instead. I stopped for a moment to consider that this was a conscious decision. I want to share my website. I love sharing my website because I made it. It’s a reflection of my personality. I maintain it. And the more I think about it, the more advantages I see to shar...

In my last post, I suggested that you should start using Claude in your software development process via read-only means at first. The idea is just to get used to interacting with the AI, seeing what it can do, and seeing what it struggles with. Once you’ve got a handle on that part, it’s time to graduate to writing code. However, I’m going to warn you about this post: I hope that by the end of it, you’re a little frustrated. This is because I don’t think it’s productive to skip to...

Over the past years, two major players invested into the future of Python. Microsoft’s Faster CPython team has pushed ahead with impressive performance improvements for the CPython interpreter, which has gotten at least 2x faster since Python 3.9. They also have a baseline JIT compiler for CPython, too. At the same time, Meta is worked hard on making free-threaded Python a reality to bring classic shared-memory multithreading to Python, without being limited by the still standard Global Interp...

Vibecoding #2 Jan 20, 2026 I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don’t expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it’s only proper if I write one. Problem Statement At TigerBeetle, we are big on deterministic simulation testing . We even use it to track performance , to some degree. Still, it is crucial to ...

Another step in the europeanisation of my tech stack Another step in the europeanisation of my tech stack

My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™ , a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early days, and is currently intended to support Thoughtworks consultants in their client work. I’m looking forward to sharing what we learn from using and further developing the platform in future months.  ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄              ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Ryan, whose blog can be found at laze.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Fabian Holzer and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hey there, I'...

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke? I made my next game twice as fast by forking go's crypto library Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/ssh-sends-100-packets-per-keystroke Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke? I made my next game twice as fast by forking go's crypto library Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/ssh-sends-100-packets-per-keystroke...

I once had a provost who felt that academic departments hindered the university as they tended to silo the faculty. He would argue we should eliminate departments and that would increase cross-disciplinary work. That went nowhere of course. He missed a critical point. While departments play an official role in hosting academic programs, they importantly serve as the main community for the faculty within the department. You see your colleagues in the department in meetings, at seminars and just w...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday, 20 January 2026 in Portland, Oregon, where it is cold, but not as cold as other places in the country. Apparently there were visible aurora last night, but I was too busy being asleep. A long one, today. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My attention 1.1 The Collapse of Form I was reading Paul Musgrave’s newsletter of today 1 on amongst other things the Mark Carney-saying-out-loud that the old international world order is dead, that Trump has kicked them al...

This is the twelfth edition of this newsletter in its current form. It’s great to see the audience for it growing, and consistently positive reception when I share it. Nice words always inspire me to carry on with it :D The substack edition (which is exactly the same content but sent out by email), is also picking up views and subscribers. A couple of blog posts from me since the last edition of Interesting Links—both outside the usual Kafka/Flink scope: A love letter...

I came across a recent article on making Linux system calls from a Wine process . Windows programs running under Wine are still normal Linux processes and may interact with the Linux kernel like any other process. None of this was surprising, and the demonstration works just as I expect. Still, it got the wheels spinning and I realized an almost practical application: build my pkg-config implementation such that on Windows pkg-config.exe behaves as a native pkg-config, but when run under ...

I’ve been blogging for two decades, but it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve had to contend with the fact that people, y’know, read my ramblings on a semi-regular or even regular basis. Hi! Hope you’re going okay. And not in the insincere “I hope this email finds you well” sense, but in a legitimate concern for your peace, health, and happiness sense. There are too many people out there who would revel in denying you these. Those people are jerks. When you’ve been w...

ABU DHABI (January 22, 2026) — LIG Nex1 held a contract commemoration event yesterday with Shield AI at UMEX 2026 (Unmanned Systems Exhibition and Conference), held in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The event was organized to commemorate the signing of a contract for a project involving the integration, flight, and testing of LIG Nex1’s multi-purpose drone-launched guided missile (L-MDM) on Shield AI’s vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft, V-BAT. Attendees included LIG Nex1 CEO Ik-hyun...

The current generation of Frontier Models are incredibly capable. It is no longer a question of what can I build but how fast can I build it. But building fast at scale introduces its own complexity. Scaling your compute and your Agents is two completely different issues that have to be done in lock step. Mise en Place With Claude Code you are now a CTO, if you enjoyed being in the weeds of your codebase and writing artisanal Python like I did you need a whole new set of skills to build at the ...

Over at Talk Python To Me , I added a couple of deep AI integrations. You can read about them here at talkpython.fm/blog/posts/announcing-talk-python-ai-integrations/ . A couple of folks in the community asked what I thought about how embracing AI consumption of our content would affect us . Or, how in the light of the tailwind situation , it might even undermine us. Wait, what happened to Tailwind? If you’re not familiar with the Tailwind situation, the TLDR is that their usage has go...

After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago. What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog , a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!). The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments . I wanted my blog to have the same level of interactivity I had pre-Thingamablog, when I was (briefly) on Xanga.c...

One of my kind readers sent this picture after getting a copy of my poetry pamphlet ^_^ It’s been two months since I released Seven uni-verses as a celebratory poetry booklet on humanity’s exploration of space. Some friends and readers have been curious about how it has fared, especially considering my unusual open access approach that also rejects traditional publishing norms. And so for public curiosity as well as for transparency on this experiment, I share below how many times my...

Last week I talked about my forays into Compiler Construction (1996). This week, I have worked through more of the book and I'm going to share some of my explorations on Wirth's approach to constant folding (and some other optimizations). Part of the guiding principle of how this book wants you to design a compiler is that we should act locally to the extent that we can. No materializing syntax trees in memory, just walk the parse tree as we parse it and shove instructions out from there as di...